Second-home villagers also feel that their boltholes provide something
significantly better than their typically upscale home environment. “What’s
different about it from a normal, home community?” asks Mike McKeown, an
executive at IT giant Cisco. “I think it’s the positive atmosphere. There’s
a relaxed, friendly, away-from-things mindset. People are more outgoing and
generally happier than in everyday life and work. People repeatedly find
that in two or three years, they make more friends than they do at home in a
much longer time.”
Birmingham-based Andrew Lamb, a commercial property consultant, and his lawyer
wife, Anne, spend their weekends and holidays at their Lower Mill home. “The
problem with second homes,” he says, “as we discovered from talking to
people, is this thing where your neighbours hate you. I’d rather buy a
mobile home than that. As a kid, we went caravanning. You’d stop somewhere
and immediately make friends with the people in the next caravan, and soon
your parents were being invited round for a barbecue. It was extremely
friendly. It’s the same now at Lower Mill. Everyone’s there for fun. So if
your neighbours are in, you’ll always be in and out for coffee or lunch or a
drink in the evening.”
Could it be just a tad too communal, though? A lot of people seeing Lower Mill
for the first time are surprised that each house doesn’t stand in its own
grounds. Paxton has made it a firm principle that his creation should not be
a place of fences and private domains. The iconic vacation developments he
admires elsewhere, such as Seaside, on the Florida Panhandle, and Port
Grimaud in France, adhere in large part to the same no-fences principle. But
how does this play with middle England, for whom the garden fence – or
Leylandii hedge – is itself an icon?
“Look,” Lamb replies, “this is a very sociable community and definitely not
somewhere for privacy. There’s nobody here we are uncomfortable living next
to.” The Lambs’ Lower Mill neighbours include barristers, medical
consultants and the chairman of a PLC but, as he explained, “Nobody I’ve met
so far has made me think, ‘What a knob,’ like you might in a normal setting.
Everybody’s pleasant, polite and open. Everybody you meet here has worked
hard and made their own money. There’s no one who seems to have inherited.
I’m convinced that explains a lot.”
And as you look deeper into this phenomenon, you find that the move towards a
more communal model of middle-class holidaying is far from unique to Lower
Mill. Right across the Cotswold Water Park, the Lake District-sized area of
former gravel workings close to Cirencester and Tetbury, development after
development is either being built or is already in operation, each seemingly
targeting a distinct segment of the urban middle class and each selling
community as a major part of its offering.
Among many, there’s the Water’s Edge (“a chance to be part of a wonderful
community”), Summer Lake, which has a fishing academy, brasserie and a heap
of other communal sports activities, and another development under
construction and backed by Philippe Starck’s design group, Yoo. The Lakes by
Yoo is concentrating its sales effort on celebrity types (Jade Jagger is
said to be buying a place there), but is trying to follow Lower Mill’s
successful model by pushing firmly on the community button. A sailing club, a
network of tree houses, an equestrian centre, a market garden and sculpture
and nature trails are all planned but not yet built.
It’s happening elsewhere, too. On the Lizard, in Cornwall, a new resort,
Trelowarren Estate, founded by a local aristocrat, Sir Ferrers Vyvyan, has a
fine restaurant, art-and-craft galleries, concerts and weekly parties for
its growing village of second homers to share. In Aberdeenshire, Donald
Trump is some way down the line in the planning process for a 1,000 holiday
home golf resort.
And on the Kent coast near Deal, an old Hi-De-Hi!-style holiday camp,
Kingsdown Park, has been all but colonised by young, professional London
families – the very people you would imagine would regard a holiday village
as anathema.
Times writer Robert Crampton and his wife, Nicola Almond, were looking
for a traditional weekend village home nearby when they stumbled upon
Kingsdown seven years ago. “When we first saw it, we thought, ‘Who could
possibly live there?’,” Crampton admits. “But the more we thought about it,
the more we realised it suited our purposes. It’s close to London and ideal
for children, so we soon overcame our own snobbery and bought our place.”
Family after family from Crampton’s Hackney milieu have followed him down to
Kent.
The movement towards middle-class holiday villages is far from being just a
southern or metropolitan phenomenon, either. A few miles back from Blackpool
(although it prefers to associate itself with tonier Lytham St Annes and the
nearby Lake District), there’s a northern version following Lower Mill’s
lead, complete with its own celebrity sightings from the worlds of sport and
showbiz. (Ricky Hatton and a lot of the big footballers love it here, I am
told by one second-homer.) Ribby Hall Village, located next to the
chocolate-box real village of Wrea Green, has been developed on a disused
county showground by a local building family. Although it doesn’t quite
aspire to being an architectural or ecology icon like its posh southern
cousin, Ribby Hall is certainly a contender in the holiday village’s surge
upmarket. The prices, for one thing, are distinctly fancy – up to £300,000
for a 50-year lease on a smart two-bedroom lodge, which is still essentially
a prefabricated wooden structure. And to judge by the cars parked by the
lodges – I spotted two late-model Bentleys, a Lamborghini and more new Range
Rovers than you could shake a stick at – the buyers here are equally
affluent.
The 106-acre village, where 320 families have bought their own properties and
others can rent (up to £1,000 a week for a log cabin with outdoor hot tub),
has a gigantic sports and leisure centre complete with two swimming pools, a
clutch of restaurants and cafés, a big delicatessen, a hangar-sized
equestrian centre, five fishing lakes, a nine-hole golf course and
crown-green bowling among several other attractions, and a £3 million spa is
on the way to add to the £25 million already invested in the project – all
this for a maximum population at peak weekends of 2,500. (In the same way as
holiday camps, the second-home communities have seasons: Ribby Hall’s runs
from March 1 to January 16, for example, while Lower Mill closes for the
whole of January.)
Ribby Hall has even slightly trumped Lower Mill, the market leader, with a
couple of innovations of its own. On Friday, September 12, for instance, it
launches a series of literary lunches in the village. Carol Thatcher, Michel
Roux and Kate Adie are among the luminaries who already have their tickets
booked. There is also a serious foodie restaurant on site, a swish
100-seater with a white piano run by TV chef Nigel Smith and endorsed by
London restaurateur Aldo Zilli, who said he had the best loin of lamb he had
ever tasted there.
